David Baker (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind, London, UK) and John M. Jumper (Google DeepMind, London, UK) win the Chemistry Nobel Prize 2024 for cracking the code for proteins’ amazing structures.
David Baker succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.
The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies, and the building blocks of different tissues.
“One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” said Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins generally consist of twenty different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function.
Since the 1970s, researchers have tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
As per the press release, since the breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic. Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.
